You can take the Gears out of the Xbox, but you can’t take the Xbox out of the Gears

You can now play Gears of War on the PlayStation 5. Despite the changes to the video game landscape in recent years, that sentence still makes me react similarly to how I would if someone said “you can now drink coffee with a fork”. My brain’s immediate reaction is to dismiss it as nonsense. It’s not. We’ve seen plenty of Xbox games on PlayStation already, but there are some games that bleed Xbox. Gears of War is one of them.

I’ll talk more about the game itself (Gears of War Reloaded, to use its full title), but first it’s worth looking back to November 2006. A year following the release of the Xbox 360, Sony was set to unleash the PlayStation 3 and start clawing back next-gen market share from Xbox.

The PS3, though, had a lacklustre launch line-up without any true showpiece games – those previous E3 presentations that the gullible believed to be actual in-game visuals did them no favours here, with MotorStorm in particular failing to get close. Resistance: Fall of Man was decent enough, but things were absolutely greener over on Xbox. The company was ready to drop the most hyped game of that generation, on or before the release of the PlayStation 3.

A look at Gears of War’s muddy visuals (that you don’t see in this modern remaster) through today’s eyes doesn’t tell the story of the time. Gears was a sensation, a rallying point for the next-generation, and a show of power. It helped make Xbox the console for an audience that wanted the booms, the online multiplayer, and the cutting-edge. Sony got its act together eventually, releasing some proper showstoppers, but Xbox 360 remained the console of choice for more people than seems possible now.

Gears of War Reloaded, then, really does trade on that sense of excellence, at least to me. I can’t play Gears of War and not remember with great fondness the awe felt when playing the campaign for the first time, the laughs had in seemingly never-ending multiplayer sessions, and frankly just how peak mid-2000s it felt to chainsaw an enemy in half with a gun. Gears of War was and still is the most bro-y shooter I’ve ever played, but 24-year-old me loved it – the spectacle, the thrills, the characters.

Reloaded, a tweaked and enhanced version of Ultimate (released 10 years ago), itself a remaster of the original, no matter how smooth it feels and how crisp it looks (in truth I had to look at screenshot comparisons to see how this version improved on Ultimate, but it does) simply can’t create that same feeling today. Games have moved on in the almost 20 years since, and those games include more recent Gears titles. That’s not to say this is a bad game, far from it, but it’ll hit differently depending on your background.

For some, Gears of War Reloaded will feel like a fairly standard shooter, one that feels a tad dated, unexpectedly clunky, and visually rather plain, even – maybe a question will be asked to find out what all the fuss was about, perhaps in an attempt to rile up Xbox fans. Fanboy arguments aside, it’s a fair thought when asked with the right intention. In truth, Gears improved quite dramatically from game to game, and the real appeal of the original today is as a window back in time – albeit a window that has been scrubbed up significantly. I see Gears of War for what it was and what it meant, and that tie to Xbox and the excitement of the era simply can’t be separated in my mind.

Going back to that launch in 2006, Xbox appeared to be ready to cement itself as a console to be reckoned with, and yet what followed – seemingly with misjudgement after misjudgement – saw the brand fall back and allow PlayStation to mop up. What a difference six Gears of War games, an expansion, a remaster (plus a second sort of remaster of the same game), and a new game in development make. In 2006 it was cool to own an Xbox, in 2025 there’s constant chatter about if Xbox consoles even have a reason to exist any more.

Context is key, and there’s no denying the starkly different Xbox we have today compared to that MTV-cool 20 years ago. We’ve had moments, fleeting as they’ve been, of a gaming division seemingly knowing what it was doing – flurries of releases that pointed towards a strong future. But these highs have been followed by monumental lows. Layoffs have affected all divisions (most recently resulting in the cancelation of Everwild and Perfect Dark), and there is a wide call to boycott Xbox products and services while Microsoft employees (including those that are part of the Xbox division) are protesting the company’s contracts with Israel tied to an ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. I can’t believe for a second that this is the Microsoft the majority of its staff want it to be, yet this is the context Xbox releases find themselves in, and it’s not pretty.

Gears of War is a game I loved, and for many reasons I think I’ll always love it, but for many reasons, that’s not so easy to sit with right now.